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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 7, 2013)
News Portland Parks Takes Fun Where the Kids Are M obile Program’s 19 sites this year are mostly in East County. “A lot of our programs take place in parks, and this is the second year where we have ventured out into apartments,” he says. The idea is to take quality activities to the children along with trained child spe- cialists who are committed to their work. “A lot of our employees are teachers that are off duty from the schools during the school year,” Milkes says. “We have quite a few folks who are new Portlanders – we like to put folks in the sites where the children will feel very culturally wel- come with the recreation leaders providing them with activities.” This mix of cultures comes together in the uni- versal need to send the kids out to play. “There is unfortunately what we call a play gap, a gap in terms of where there is access in terms of recre- ational opportunity for children, in comparison to what really we believe they should have,” Milkes says. The larger Summer Play- grounds Program itself, dating back 107 years, oper- ates at 46 sites, 21 of which run free kids’ lunch pro- grams. There’s also Movies in the Park, the Washington Park Summer Festival, free Open Play Swim, Concerts in the Park, and more. See the complete schedule, including free children’s Vietnamese, Nepali, Span- ish, Russian, Burmese, Chinese and English. The Mobile Parks Pro- gram is also growing by leaps and bounds every year, with nearly 4,000 kids participating in 2012. The effort reaches so many kids because the fam- ily-focused events are put together with the help of Overall, Parks officials count a quarter million kids participating in the Summer Parks Program lunch dates and times, go to www.portlandparks.org. The issue of free lunches for the children is a key part of why the Summer Parks Program is so important – some 100,000 kids’ lunches were served last summer alone, and this year is on track to reach at least that number. Overall, Parks officials count a quarter million kids participating in the Summer Parks Program, with infor- mational brochures printed in eight languages: Somali, Page 12 The Portland Skanner August 7, 2013 community members who attend meetings starting each January. “The important thing to me is that we get it right for the children – the right loca- tions at the right times — and that’s a bit of a chal- lenge,” Milkes said. “That’s exactly where we need the community input.” In fact, concerned people should start thinking now about what their community needs are, and consider get- ting involved next winter to help get those needs met. “With the assistance of members of the East Port- land Parks Coalition, which is made up of many volun- teers from different neighborhood associations in the outer east, we started in January trying to figure out which parks had the greatest need for the pro- gram,” Milkes said. But the key ingredient besides community partici- pation is funding. The wider Summer Play- grounds Project does provide some of the Mobile Playground funding, but Milkes says much of the growth in East County this year is from the East Port- land Action Plan and Multnomah County – which he says stepped in to fund a third of the mobile play- ground program specifically for East County. Citywide demographics show that’s where the majority of kids live and where most of the growth in families is taking place. Milkes says one of his most important goals is to make sure there is equity among all the different cul- tural backgrounds of the kids involved in the summer Staff at the Portland Parks and Recreation Mobile Playground Program are trained in child development. programs. “That there’s a program for everybody and there’s access for everyone – get- ting through those barriers is a real challenge,” he says. Find out more online at www.portlandparks.org.
